


elegies we gave to other people (and a sonnet i wrote for you)

by shinyhappyfitsofrage



Category: The X-Files
Genre: 2 Adults are angsty, Angst, F/M, Romance, i don't even know what im doing, it starts ok and then gets real sad but ends happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-05
Updated: 2017-04-05
Packaged: 2018-10-15 03:21:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10549208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinyhappyfitsofrage/pseuds/shinyhappyfitsofrage
Summary: "So, you used to work for the FBI." How easily ten years can be trimmed down to seven words. A decade of case reports and dust on basement windows, of hours on highways she’s sure don’t have ends, of men with knives and with guns hidden behind their backs, of musty motel rooms that became singular. All crammed into eight syllables. “Yes, I did.”(six times they found themselves with other people. one time they were with each other)





	

**Author's Note:**

> i don't know what im doing i literally have two papers due within the next week and yet!!!! i said i needed to move on & actually do my work and not spend my time grieving over the fact that i have finished this show and yet! 
> 
> i intended this to be times they loved other people, but one of the scully ones is sort of cheating sorry (the episode was described as a "seduction of minds" or something like that so idec).
> 
> [I KNOW THESE X TIMES THINGS R CLICHE! IDC!!! IM HAVING FUN fuk u guys]

2010

“So,” he says. “You used to work for the FBI.”

It’s a simple enough question, but still Dana feels herself pause, her wine glass halfway to her lips. She hasn’t done this in a long time. Explaining herself, parceling her whole person into neat declarative sentences, like the ones in her grammar textbook back in elementary school. _I am forty-six years old. I used to work for the FBI. I have one son_. No subordinate clauses or parentheses. No room for further elucidation.

 _I used to work for the FBI._ Scully then, Dana now, smiles to herself. How easily ten years can be trimmed down to seven words. A decade of case reports and dust on basement windows, of hours on highways she’s sure don’t have ends, of men with knives and with guns hidden behind their backs, of musty motel rooms that became singular. All crammed into eight syllables. “Yes, I did.”

“What was that like?” he asks, grinning, not tripped by her glassy hesitation. His name is Michael and he’s a friend of a coworker, a widower with a steady job in finance and a beach house in Cape Cod and two daughters in college. Like herself, all of the information he’s shared fits just fine into single units. “Exciting, right? You ever get shot?”

Her fingernails skid against her wine-glass. The sound is smooth and slick and makes her just a little bit nauseous. _No, but they shot my sister because she stood where I stood. No, but I shot my best friend to save his life. No, but I put a bullet in a man’s head in my own apartment and I didn’t feel remorse_.

No, but. Complicated sentence structure. Dana laughs thinly and shakes her head, but she goes back to her apartment alone that night and makes herself a bowl of cereal that somehow tastes better than her fifteen dollar steak, and she stays up until two watching a movie on television her niece had told her she’d like, and even though she was wrong Dana doesn’t mind, because it’s loud and fast and it drowns out the sounds of a man who had called her by her last name and loved her in parentheticals.

 

1993

Phoebe is all rounded curves and loose smiles, and he likes the shape of her body in his hands and the bareness of her neck, no longer hidden by her dark hair. In college, it had been down to her hips because she was always a fan of doing whatever her mother didn’t want her to do, and he still remembers the way it would stick to her bare back after she’d leave his bed. Invariably, the first thing she would always do is scrape the curls, still sweaty, off her spine and pull them into a ponytail, then turn look at him before he could compose himself, her face smug. Phoebe knew what she was doing in 1983 and she knows what she’s doing now as she kisses him in a hotel lobby, to the tune of a violin concerto he might recognize if it wasn’t muddled by walls and distance.

Of course, _he_ doesn’t know what she’s doing. Never has really understood her, her violent outbursts that were always followed by weeks of sullen silence. But Mulder doesn’t work for the FBI for nothing, and he has a theory or two. No forensic evidence but plenty of circumstantial, and anyway he’s got his intuition, and the reassurance that comes from knowing Phoebe has never been one to be patient, too excited to reveal her latest schemes to hold out for something worthwhile.

And she does, in grand fashion as always. “So, Fox, perhaps you’d like to get coffee later?” she says, on her way out the hotel door, turning over her shoulder to look at him like it really is 1983 again. “Continue our conversation from last night?”

It’s almost imperceptible, but Mulder catches her glance over at the woman in the corner, the five foot tall red head (or so he’s been told, anyway) who is suddenly buried in a stack of documents she hadn’t cared about moments ago. _Ah._ So that’s what this is about. Ownership, not about genuine affection. His suspicions weren’t far off.

Scully has never played games with him, he finds himself thinking. He quickly dismisses the thought as idiotic, however. After all, Scully has never had the chance to. Scully has never woken up in his sheets, the sunrise tangled up in her hair, a promise that tastes like last night’s wine on her lips.

He dismisses _that_ thought, too, before it becomes too permanent.

“I think everything has been said,” he says, his voice clipped. She’s the one who dredged up 1983 and now it’s all started to come rushing back, like a loud, pounding migraine to the melody of the goddamn concerto he still can’t name.

Phoebe slams the door on the way out. He can see Scully struggle to swallow down a smile.

(He asks her a couple days later about the concerto, and she briskly replies before he can finish his question, “Violin Concerto No. 3. Mozart. G major.” She knows, like she always does. He tells her that’s the first X-file they’ve ever completely solved and she laughs brightly. It’s a sound he likes, and he resolves to carve its every note, every key change into his memory, right alongside Bach, right above her smile.)

2000

“You’d die for Mulder, but you won’t allow yourself to love him.”

 _That’s what you think_ , is her first thought. She looks out the window, at the grassy hills that all blend together, waves and waves of everlasting green, and she scoffs. At the absurdity, the rotting man might assume. At the presumptuousness of his accusation. At how far from the truth it is.

But last weekend she had woken up in Mulder’s sheets, sunrise tangled up in her hair and in her eyes. When he whispered good morning to her, his breath had still smelled like last night’s red wine and she had let herself get a little drunk all over again. She’d spent the morning wearing one of his old shirts (“This smells suspiciously like swamp monster, Mulder.” “They prefer the term Wetland American, Scully.”), working on the same cup of coffee for an hour as she moved slowly from his bed to his kitchen table, back to his bed, and then his couch, where she laid, reading the case file she’d intended to finish last night, before the wine and the inevitable sunrise, while he went for a run. When he came back thirty minutes later, she already had a complaint lined up, something generic about the poor lighting in his apartment and the stiffness of his couch that made doing work impossible.

“You could go back to your apartment, you know,” he’d told her, the logical nature of his argument completely offset by the grin on his face. He’d climbed over the arm of the couch, pinning her under him. “It’s not like you’re trapped here.”

“ _Gross_ , Mulder.” She’d wrinkled her nose at his sweat drenched shirt and had pushed at his shoulders with her palms, but she’d laughed when he’d kissed her, sloppy aim landing it on the tip of her nose, and she’d laughed when he kept trying to get it right until finally she smiled into his lips.

“Why don’t you go home,” he’d said, his voice just above a whisper, and the smile receding into something more ardent, something more lost. It felt like a prayer. The king of unsubstantiated leaps and bounds, the darling of the Violent Crimes Section, and this was the case he couldn’t solve.

Or maybe he’d wanted her to solve it for him. Like back in the beginning when he was goading her with halves of sentences, waiting for her to fill in what he was thinking so he could grin victoriously. He liked being right, but he liked someone else believing he was right even more. In his apartment, Scully had linked her arms around his neck. “You know why,” she’d said. It had and it hadn’t been enough.

That’s what you think. As if you have any fucking idea. Scully has the strangest urge to scream.

But she doesn’t. It’s too personal, anyway. Doesn’t belong in this car with the rotting, festering man. Instead, she’ll let Mulder decode her breaths on the wire and later, when they’re alone, he can tell her his theory.

And this one she won’t debunk.

1994

The cross around his neck doesn’t change the fact that he’s godless.

No, it’s more than godless. It’s not a simple lack, but the complete antithesis of. Kristen kisses his chin, kisses his neck, jostling the chain in the process, and try as he might he can’t forget that every atom in his body is nothing short of _unholy_. The necklace doesn’t protect him as much as call attention to it. Sin is always more obvious when it stands next to saints. Filth is more obvious when its next to gold.

He used to think that about the two of them, too. It must have been so pathetically obvious to anyone who saw the pair of them that _she_ was the good one, the better one, the great one. Her head held high, her spine straight. Christ against her collarbone. She barely reached his shoulder and yet Scully was so much _more_ than him, in every possible sense of the word.

Mulder had never hoped for much out of life. For two decades he had lived for the quest, for the unsolved truth, for his sister. Everything else ( _house in the country, someone smiles at him in a king sized bed, a small hand wraps itself around his own_ ) seemed pointless, seemed unfair to ask for when Samantha couldn’t. And he had been content to dig himself an early grave in a basement office that smelled enduringly of dust, but Scully was destined to do more, be more, see more. And he had condemned her. The Judas to her Jesus.

His heart catches on the past tense, and for a moment he thinks it might break right there. _Stop, stop, stop_ , he begs, until his head is swimming with something akin to prayers but with more fractures, and forces himself back into the present, and breathes in Kristen’s skin. At least she’s unholy too.

(“I hated wearing your necklace,” he admits to her years later, in a hotel room near Barcelona. He doesn’t elaborate, but she understands, and later that night she kisses his chest, where his heart is, like it’s something worthwhile. For once he’s the skeptic.)

1997

Ed is all crooked smiles and lean muscle, and she likes the feeling of his lips on her neck and his hands on her hips, and she likes the raggedness of her breathing, and she likes the fact that she feels _alive_ , so divinely, wonderfully, and above all _undeniably_ alive. Here it is - the twin heartbeats, jumping and breaking, the blood rushing through her chest, the proof she has been searching for. Irrefutable evidence. With all the signs of life so brazenly there, how could she possibly be dying?

She knows how, of course, but in Ed’s barren apartment in Philadelphia, it’s easy to forget, at least for a night, about the blood on her pillow, Leonard Betts’ grasping hands. It’s easy to forget that she is Doctor Dana Scully, that she is Special Agent Dana Scully, that she’s the one who has the facts and certainties and realities in her hands, holding them like knives.

She’s the one who, for three and a half years, stood in that basement office amid the dust and the newspaper clippings and the ghosts of people Mulder couldn’t save, and she’d listened to him tell her that he believed, and each time her heart had broken open a little more. She once had been brought to tears, by herself in her apartment, because it wasn’t that he believed or even wanted to believe, he _had_ to believe, so desperately _needed_ to find a truth beyond hers and beyond his parents’ and beyond the Bureau’s. Like sharks have to keep swimming or drown. And she had cried because sometimes she couldn’t bear those being his only options, and sometimes she wanted to slap him, and force him to wake up, force him to get the drowning over and done with, force him to move on.

Now, she understands. Now, Scully is the believer, and oh God, how she wants to believe. How she needs it. Now, she’s the one latching on to signs and symbols, storing them away for future testimony. More evidence. If Ed’s kiss bruises her collarbone, it means she’s alive. If he pulls her hair three times too hard before the clock strikes midnight, it means she’s alive. If she wakes up at 4am, and wonders if Mulder’s awake in a different city, well. That means she’s alive.

There are no atheists in foxholes. So Scully believes.

1939

She _looks_ like Scully, but that’s the only real connection that exists. Doesn’t really talk like her (although his Scully is also probably going to yell at him whenever he gets back). Doesn’t really act like her (although his Scully would also be unafraid and undeterred, even in the face of arguably history’s greatest evil). Doesn’t really dress like her (although the idea of his Scully wearing something like this is, well. It’s something). The only real similarities are physical, inconsequential. It is Scully – same eyes, height, hair they keep telling him is red, lips – but it isn’t _his_ Scully – the hard set of her jaw, the subtle attempts to make herself more formidable despite her small size, the sharpness of her wit, the fingers that gently tug at his wrist. This woman is an illusion, a stranger. Beautiful but unknown.

But still, the eyes and height and supposed red hair and the lips, that’s all the same. And he would know – he’s studied her for years, has memorized the faded constellations of freckles across the bridge of her nose like they were as immortal as the real Milky Way. He’s spent half a decade watching her from behind his desk, watching the almost indiscernible movements of her lips as she read, wondering what she would do if he kissed her, right then, right there.

Besides, he has a suspicion this might all be a dream, anyway. The chances of exact copies of everyone he knows all existing at the same time on the same ship are improbable, even he can admit that (Then again, what are the chances that he and Scully know each other at all? One in a billion? One in a trillion?). Or if it’s not a dream, he’s seen _Back to the Future_ over a dozen times, and he’s pretty confident that as long as he doesn’t fuck with his parents’ first kiss at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance, he’ll still be born and everything.

And besides all that, he really wants to.

“In case we never meet again,” he tells her, and he kisses her before he can lose his nerve. Her lips taste like sea salt and champagne, like sweat, like the end of the world. The year is 1939 and it will be fifty-nine years before he tells her he loves her, sixty-one years before he swallows his bloody, beating heart for long enough to kiss her again, sixty-two years before he holds their child, their son in his arms and for a moment sees what she means when she says _God_.

It is worth the wait.

2000, again

This new millennium is all right, Scully decides about three months in. She comes to such a conclusion on a cloudless night in March, curled under sheets that aren’t hers but still are perfectly familiar. Mulder’s arm is curled around her shoulders. His breath still smells like the bottle of red wine they had finished that night, when she’d come over with excuses as flimsy as the case report she’d carried (“I have to work, Mulder,” she’d insisted for the sake of old times, as he’d pulled the file out of her hand and pulled her into him). It’s well past midnight. She didn’t know _sleepy_ tasted like _in love_ , didn’t know _contentment_ could be felt so viscerally.

She feels his body shift as he moves his lips to her ear. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Scully heaves an exaggerated sigh, and the sound is impossibly big for his bedroom, for just two people to hear. Wriggling in his arms, she rolls over to look at him, at the heavy-eyed one am smile on his face. She can detect a triumphant sort of disbelief, even though New Year’s Eve was weeks ago and she had responded to his first move with a second and third and fourth and fifth.

Nevertheless, it’s still her job to pull him back down to earth. “It’s early March, Mulder,” she reminds him dutifully.

He is ever the undeterred, ever the resolute. He smiles wider and moves to kiss her as he continues. Poetry against her lips. “Thou art more lovely and more temperate.”

“And _anyway_ , Mulder, Sonnet 18 is from the procreation sonnets, which were written to -“

“Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.” Shakespeare tastes like sunflower seeds and wine.

“- Shakespeare’s _friend_ in an attempt to convince him to get married and have children."

“And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.” Shakespeare smells like laundry detergent, cologne he only wears when he’s trying to impress her, a car air freshener hanging from his bedpost. Mulder moves his head back to lean his forehead against hers. “Scully, be honest. This is turning you on, right?”

Scully rolls her eyes, biting down on the inside of her lip to stop herself from smiling too much too soon. “This is, by far and without question, the most pretentious shit you have _ever_ pulled,” she whispers.

The sheets shift as Mulder shrugs his shoulders. “English undergrad,” he says apologetically. “At Oxford. But you never answered my question.”

She unintentionally yawns, laughing halfway through at the offended look on his face. She burrows against him, her eyes shutting as she leans her head against his chest, breathes him in. “Try something I didn’t have to memorize in the sixth grade.”

“But soft! What light –“

“Mulder!”

She can feel his quiet laughter course down her spine, feel him hum as he searches for the right response. Finally, his hand comes to sit on her back as, in an undertone, he says, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove…”

Shakespeare sounds like his voice, rough from one am, sounds like the muted buzz of his fan, the faint calls of the city from beyond the bedroom.

“O no; it is an ever-fixed mark, that looks on tempests, and is never shaken.”

Shakespeare feels like skin on skin, his chin resting on top of her head, sheets tucked under her knees and around her fingertips, night air from the open window brushing her cheek.

“It is the star to every wandering bark, whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.”

Shakespeare looks like her outline merged with his, her clothes in a pile on his floor, the calendar open to March 2000. Shakespeare looks like moonlight that forms a halo around his head, even though he always swore he was a sinner.

Shakespeare looks like this, like them, and as Scully drifts to sleep to the lull of his voice she thinks with assurance that she likes this new millennium, even if it’s a false millennium, and she would be okay if it stayed.

Two months later, rough winds not only shake the darling buds of May but him, carrying him somewhere she cannot follow. She will scream and sob and curse, but she will carry those five months around everywhere she goes like a rosary. Something singular and beautiful and irreplaceable. Something irrevocably hers but also irrevocably beyond her.

It’s still March, however, so she gets to love him. It’s still March, so she has loved him for every second of the next one thousand years. It’s still March, so she gets to wake up in the morning in his bed, with sunshine tangled in her hair and eyes, a promise that tastes like last night’s wine on her lips. His hand tangled around her.

It’s still March and that is enough.

* * *

_Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks_  
_Within his bending sickle's compass come;_  
_Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,_  
_But bears it out even to the edge of doom._  
_If this be error and upon me proved,_  
_I never writ, nor no man ever loved._

**Author's Note:**

> mulder 100% is an english major you can tell from the everything about him and he 100% recites romeo & juliet all the time with the intention of annoying scully, but also if she ever was really into that he would be ok with that too. also i know sonnet 18 is very gay! it has been interpreted as purely friendship and so i used the interpretation that would give scully the biggest bone to pick with mulder sorry
> 
> i proofread it but im sure there are mistakes but i have a class i have to go to in 10 minutes so ill reread it later sorry bye
> 
> again, i am trying to NOT spend all my time Doing This because i have things i have to do in My Real Life but i hope you liked it!


End file.
